AMD next-gen GPUs help OTOY put Crysis on iPhone

Temped by Crysis on the iPhone? Even with its most recent processor and graphics boost, Apple’s 3GS smartphone isn’t quite up to that level, but OTOY have been showing off how, thanks to AMD’s next-gen GPUs, they can squirt Crysis-level HD gaming across a network to your mobile. AMD demonstrated their next-gen platform’s 2.5 teraFLOPS of floating-point power and DirectX 11 abilities this week, and OTOY were on hand to show Ars Technica just how they’re using all that power.

Now we’ve seen OTOY’s system before – then on a Samsung Omnia, complete with an Xbox 360 controller – and so know a little about the concept. Basically, rather than do all the graphics crunching on the local device, something that in this case would exceed the capabilities of the iPhone, it’s done remotely on OTOY’s server farm; those frames are compressed, fired over the network, and then reconstituted on the handset by a small local app (about 780K in size).

Ars reporter Jon Stokes reported that it was “surprisingly responsive” on full-size systems, although suffered some input lag and jagged graphics on the big screens AMD had supplied, but for casual mobile gaming it made far more sense. “The iPhone’s screen was small enough that I couldn’t discern any compression artifacts,” Stokes says, “and the gameplay was smooth and responsive.”

According to the OTOY engineer, 20Mbits is the magic network throughput number at which point 1080p quality is stable – though not, we imagine, on an iPhone – and it starts to look pretty bad for standalone consoles and PC gaming. More details at OTOY’s site.